2025 Preview: Two Point Museum looks to build on a winning, funny formula

Although you can’t move for simulation games these days, the Two Point series fills a niche that had been forgotten for too long. The first entry, Two Point Hospital, was directly intended to be a spiritual successor to the classic ‘90s sim Theme Hospital.

While others had tried to replicate the old-school Bullfrog style, Two Point Hospital excelled by bringing back some of the developers who actually worked on Theme Hospital, leading to a spiritual successor which delivered that perfect British sense of humor and absurdity that was lacking in so many of its imitators.

The second game, Two Point Campus, was even more interesting because the studio was then able to take that Bullfrog feel and apply it to an entirely new setting instead of a hospital, freeing it from the shackles of ensuring it lived up to a decades-old ancestor.

Now with its third game, Two Point Studios hopes to push the formula even further and add new elements to the gameplay, to ensure this isn’t just the same routine slapped onto another different type of building.

Of course, as the name suggests, another type of building is exactly the point: this time you’re in charge of a museum, and with this new role comes a new set of responsibilities and goals.

Naturally, the whole point is to put together a set of displays which keep the visitors interested, but as is the case with games of this ilk, there’s much more to it than this and simply chucking a bunch of old artefacts around isn’t going to be enough to ensure success.

ou have to make sure they’re placed in a suitable area, that they’re properly decorated and signposted, that there are donation boxes strategically placed near the more interesting exhibits, that your staff are kept fit and don’t run out of energy, that the janitors are well-located to make sure everything remains tidy and dust free, and so on.

In this sense at least, although the tasks are different, the overall structure of the game remains familiar, and players who have already been enjoying Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus will feel immediately at home with Two Point Museum and its UI.

The main difference this time comes with the Expeditions, which see you gaining new in-game content in a more proactive way. Instead of just allocating funds to researchers and automatically unlocking new items over time as in numerous other sims, this time you’re actually in charge of sending your staff out on various trips around the world.

These trips vary in duration and danger, so obviously the longer and deadlier journeys are the ones that will deliver the most interesting artefacts for your museum.

“The main difference this time comes with the Expeditions, which see you gaining new in-game content in a more proactive way.”

You have to earn these adventures, however: at first your map only shows one or two locations, but by meeting various objectives across the game you’ll unlock new locations, organically growing the map as you make your way through each scenario.

We got to spend a few hours with Two Point Museum earlier in 2024 and it was the Expeditions feature that made it clear that there’s a lot of potential for longevity here.

We’re already excited about the idea of building enormous museums with separate halls providing different exhibitions, and as long as that expectation is met with the same sense of humour we’ve come to expect from the series by now, Two Point Museum is set to be another winner.

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